The Reconstruction of Critical Theory: From Ideology Critique to Communicative Reason

Abstract

In this chapter I want to explore the way in which Jérgen Habermas, since the mid 1960s, has sought to reconstruct Critical Theory along lines that overcome the pessimism and contradictoriness of his predecessors’ work. After the Second World War, in 1950, Horkheimer revived the Institute for Social Research fairly successfully though ties were broken with Neumann and Kircheimer, and Fromm, and Marcuse settled in America. However, the broader dilemmas underpinning its existence were not resolved, but came more sharply into focus. The contradiction between its early Marxist optimism and its later ‘Nietzschean’ pessimism remained, and its relation to wider German society also became rather odd. Increasingly, the Institute found itself seeking funds from any quarter it could, and identified itself as part of the renewal of German capitalism. Whether one takes the early Marxist version, or the later ‘Nietzschean’ one to be the real Critical Theory, neither model lends itself, in an obvious way, to being a vehicle for commercial or state sponsorship. Yet this was the official direction in which Horkheimer, perhaps inevitably, led the Institute. Wiggerhaus (1994: ch. 6), rather unkindly I think, describes the Institute’s position in the early 1950s as the ‘Critical Ornament of a Restoration Society’.